I did plan on posting more in February.
For real, I had a list of topics planned out, including a list of unsung heroes and heroines from the Civil Rights Movement. I did my research, took copious notes, even had a draft of a couple of entries. Instead, I only got this one. And when I stopped to think about why, the answer came startlingly quick.
I’m not a fan of Black History Month. Some people might find that blasphemous, but there it is.
Before we continue, I want you to think about some names. Fred Hampton. Claudette Colvin. Ruby Bridges. Bayard Rustin. Got it? Okay.
When I was a kid, Black History Month was a welcome break from the normal curriculum, where the (majority) white teachers at my (majority) Black schools would uncomfortably tell us about the evils of slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, and the horror of Jim Crow before Martin Luther King, Jr. descended upon Washington armed with a speech and made everyone see the error of their ways. They would do it as quickly as possible, as there was a strict 28-day time limit before we went back to learning about American History ™.
There are so many ways in which this is wrong. For starters, in the US, we are taught Black History separate from the rest of American History, as if everything that happened in a parallel universe. Black History Month is, sadly, the school curriculum at its most introspective about the brutality in this nation’s history (much to the chagrin of the native nations destroyed by it). And while I do get the logic, to some degree, of somewhat sanitizing your history for a six-year-old’s eyes, the babying of American students, especially white kids, with regard to how people have been historically treated when they’re not WASPs is criminal.
My elementary school was PS 91 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. My five years there, I had one Black teacher—Ms. Cunningham in the 3rd grade—and not even she was permitted to tell me that the first man to die in the American Revolution was Black. Crispus Attucks. That’s information I had to find on my own, by accident, in a library book I found so stunning I never returned it. I did hand Ms. Cunningham a book report on that book detailing his life, and I think I got a decent grade on it.
I was in middle school—Mahalia Jackson Intermediate School, IS 391—in 1991 when I learned for the first time that slavery was once legal in New York. Was I a naïve kid? Maybe. But that stuff was not taught to ninth graders. How did I find out? In October of that year, they dug up an African Burial Ground underneath the streets of Lower Manhattan when they were excavating for a new Federal Building. At least of the recovered bodies were enslaved people from the early days of the city’s history and into the early days of the American Revolution. It wasn’t even touched on the next February.
In high school, I took AP American History my junior year. I went to one of the better high schools in the city at the time, and even though we were supposed to be taking this as a “college-level” course, all of the contributions Black men and women made to this country were squeezed into 28 days, starting with Harriet Tubman and ending with MLK.
And that was the month at its best, in my opinion. These days, as it’s been a couple of decades since the last time I was in a classroom, I see the profit-driven way it’s displayed. Restaurants and cafeterias have “African-inspired” options (seriously, what is “West African Brisket?”), clothing stores put out their most colorful options alongside smiling Black faces in their advertising campaigns. And on whatever day comes after February 28th, it all comes down.
So, yeah, not a fan. I think Black History Month, as it is right now, is reductive, and it fails at its attempt to distill the experience and history of the nearly 50 million Black people living in the United States into a short, sanitized, history snack. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting eliminating Black History Month, or replacing it, just that if there's no other context before or after February, the month loses its meaning.
If I’m being honest, our people’s history in this country should absolutely be taught alongside the rest of it, interspersed with the rest of it. If we’re trying to teach our children what America is, in a way that lines up with the reality that Americans face today, we need to teach them where we have failed to live up to the nation’s ideals. Where we have fallen short, where we have taken shortcuts instead of the right way. The only way to do that is to treat the history of the formerly enslaved and their descendants as if it is part of the shared story (complete with apologies), instead of as a bass-ackwards alternate universe that we conveniently trot out in the shortest month of the year and put away when we’re done. Fred Hampton is as much a part of American History—especially during that time period—as Dr. King and Malcolm X; Bayard Rustin is every bit as important as Adam Clayton Powell; Ruby Bridges (who still lives today) Claudette Colvin are every bit as notable as Rosa Parks.
And if any of those names made you ask “who?”, then congratulations, that’s my point.